Medical facilities such as hospitals and doctor's offices employ numerous medical devices to obtain and/or analyze samples from patients. These analytical instruments are often placed at different locations throughout the medical facility.
Typically, such instruments are connected to or communicate with a stand-alone computer to perform the data management functions relating to the processing of patient data. However, several problems exist with this arrangement. For example, the user must physically walk to the computer to see and/or manipulate the data from a particular device. In another example, the computer typically has a different user interface than the user interface of the instrument. Furthermore, in facilities using different instruments for different procedures, each instrument may have its own interface. These different user interfaces require the user to learn how to navigate through each user interface to perform the necessary tasks, and to quickly distinguish the differences between them. Moreover, if an analytical instrument is used outside of the facility in which it normally operates, the user would be unable to perform the data management functions without the stand-alone computer, or without having to return the instrument to the facility prior to performing any of these functions. This results in a cumbersome requirement to maintain the data management capabilities when the user travels with the instrument.
The medical facility may also employ a server computer for the storage of information associated with, for instance, the analytical data. The instruments (or other computers) traditionally communicate with the server to access the information. A user located at the server, however, cannot typically analyze a sample. Also, if many instruments request information from the server at approximately the same time, communications may be delayed. Moreover, if the server experiences a failure and has to be repaired, the retrieval of the data is delayed until the problem is fixed or until another server replaces the faulty server. Such server-centric arrangements can result in a chain reaction of inefficiencies such as data unavailability and inefficient medical treatment.